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End Point Europe meeting in Warsaw

Recently End Point's European crew from Italy, Germany, and Poland met up for two full days in Warsaw. We rented an apartment and the four full-time End Pointers (Kamil, Szymon, Lele, and Jon) and two interns (Zed, Phin) worked together there on several projects.

It was great to take advantage of the chance to collaborate in person on several projects, many of which we just got off the ground there:

Kamil and Szymon started work on a new AngularJS auto-CRUD admin (like RailsAdmin and the Django admin), which may grow into the Interchange 6 admin. Jon added support to Perl's SQL::Translator (aka SQLFairy) to import/export database schemas in JSON format, which the Angular.js admin app can use.

Lele started work on upgrading our Request Tracker instance, which is more complicated than we would like, but needs to be done.

Szymon showed us all some details of Debian (and Ubuntu) package building that he's done for Google, and packaged some simple internal scripts that we've only had in RPM and Yum to date.

Zed worked more on our Android time tracking app, and Kamil threatened to start an iOS port of it since he's fallen in love with Objective-C.

We started an experiment to use Ansible to manage some server configurations that have been unmanaged to date. While several of us at End Point have experience with Puppet and Chef, only Lele has used Ansible, and it seems it may be a good fit for some cases we have in mind.

Server updates: It's very convenient for us to schedule server downtime in Europe's morning while the United States users sleep, so we took advantage of that and got some updates done.

The apartment worked out great. It had a balcony with a nice view, and it gave us an inexpensive place to work and cook most of our food:

Lele volunteered to sleep on the couch since we were one bed short!

A few times we got out to see some of the sights in Warsaw, which is a great city that deserves a proper tourist visit to do it justice.